Little more than a female riff on 'Dead Poets Society', 'Mona Lisa Smile' sees Julia Roberts deliver one of her more grating performances of recent times. She plays 1950s liberal-minded art professor, Katherine Watson, who arrives at Wellesley, a private girl's school where academic excellence is a given but you're only as good as the man you marry. Of course, free-thinker that she is, Katherine soon sets about encouraging her gangly class to form some independent thought and maybe - shock horror! - going on to college rather than tending to their future husbands. Needless to say, forces within the college don't want to encourage any of this reckless behaviour and come down heavy on the plucky professor. Yawn.
While 'Dead Poets Society' is hardly on speaking terms with classic status, at least it had something resembling a heart, which is a lot more than can be said for 'Mona Lisa Smile'. A vapid excursion, in which there's no sense of dimension or inspiration, 'Mona Lisa Smile' trundles along for almost two hours, refusing to do anything remotely interesting with its well worn formula. If that wasn't insulting enough, the hypocritical morale certainly is - the film sermonises with a banal zeal about the joys of female independence, yet routinely abandons it whenever a misty-eyed romantic possibility appears. There's some terrific young actresses co-starring here - Dunst, Stiles and Gyllenhaal in particular - but there's nothing for them to do other than run through an array of second hand emotions. Roberts, on the otherhand, just looks so pleased with herself that 'Mona Lisa Smile' becomes something of an endurance test.
